A monolithic ceramic capacitor has a laminated structure obtained by preparing ceramic green sheets, forming a layer of metal paste for internal electrodes on each ceramic green sheet, stacking them and firing the resulstant stacked body. In comparison with the conventional condenser, such a monolithic capacitor is advantageous because it is small-sized and has a large capacity. Therefore, it has been already put into practical use.
As a dielectric material of a monolithic ceramic capacitor, recently, a dielectric ceramic containing lead has been widely used because a relatively high dielectric constant can be obtained and sintering can be carried out at low temperature. When such a dielectric is sintered in a reducing atmosphere, insulating characteristics are deteriorated. Therefore, sintering is carried out in an oxidizing atmosphere and, in general, as an internal electrode material which is sintered together with the dielectric simultaneously, there is used a noble metal such as stable silver-palladium alloy or the like which is not oxidized, dissolved and reacted with the dielectric even if sintering is carried out in an oxidizing atmosphere.
However, since a silver-palladium alloy is extremely expensive, the production cost becomes expensive. Further, there are disadvantages that properties are deteriorated by migration of silver during use and equivalent series resistance becomes large because of a small conductivity.